Samantha Bee is, hands down, the best performer on late night TV. Her show is a lean 21 minutes, once a week, but it’s packed with more good material, more sharply delivered, than all of her “boys’ club” competition.
Category Archive: TV
I’m amazed, humbled, and grateful that you’ve found Moss Island and read what comes out of my head. Thank you. Here’s to the year ahead, and a glance behind at my favorite things in 2015.
My initial Christmas list came in at an unwieldy 42 items, including dramas, sitcoms, specials and movies. To impose some order, I decided that the wonderfully arbitrary Top Ten format would control, and I limited the scope to sitcoms. Even that was tough, but this list, like all top ten lists, should start conversations and tell you something about the author. It is not definitive, except in the sense that it captures what I thought was best at a (sober) moment in time.
People gather at my house for Thanksgiving. They seem to like the food, although my coffee, beer, and […]
I waited in vain over 500 minutes for a twist that might align the show with something beyond its paranoid, easy target fantasies… The show never questions whether the hackers might be wrong – the group is unambiguously set up as virtuous, despite the implication of their name, fsociety. They love society!
This collection is in the finest tradition of top-ten lists. Seemingly random and “aha-of-course” in equal measure. You’ll disagree and wonder how I could have possibly left out [your favorite theme song.] It’s probably because I’m a jerk, or because I have no taste.
Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp reunites the entire cast of the original and ups the ante with a host of A-list guests, all willing to play on Showalter and Wain’s sweet slacker wavelength.
Show Me a Hero arrives at a time when political leadership in the U.S. is increasingly extreme, less pragmatic, in platform and practice. Also, race relations in our country are not good. It was easy for most to believe they weren’t racist when groups like the Ku Klux Klan provided convenient figureheads. We’ve only begun to understand that institutional racism is the part of the iceberg underneath the water, vast and intractable.
I regard Community as a work of genius, one of the greatest sitcoms ever. Creator and writer Dan Harmon is an asshole auteur – difficult and eminently worth the difficulty.
Schumer’s comedy series Inside Any Schumer (the title works in a number of ways) just finished its third season. In my opinion, it’s the most consistently funny sketch series since The Carol Burnett Show. I compiled the following list of my favorite sketches.